Serving Boone, Blowing Rock, Banner Elk, and other towns of the North Carolina High Country
Founded 05-05-05
April 12, 2007 issue
Regional Author Robert Morgan Reads Locally
April 18 and 19
Story by Allison Peacock
Regional author Robert Morgan will give a reading from selections of his award-winning prose and poetry at ASU’s Belk Library, accompanied by mountain music performances on Wednesday, April 18, at 7:00 p.m. He will then read in the King-Shivell Art Gallery in the Cannon Student Center at Lees-McRae College on Thursday, April 19, at 7:00 p.m. These events are free and open to the public.
Morgan was born in Hendersonville, N.C. and grew up on a family farm in the Green River valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains. As a teenager, he was interested in composing music, as well as in writing poetry and fiction. However, he started out studying engineering and applied mathematics at North Carolina State University.
Morgan’s first writing teacher was the novelist Guy Owen at N.C. State. O wen encouraged Morgan to write stories and poems about the place and people where he grew up. After this experience, he transferred to UNC-Chapel Hill and graduated with a B.A. in English. He later received a Master of Fine Arts degree from UNC-Greensboro.
His earliest publications were short stories, but he soon became caught up in the excitement about poetry in the late 1960s.
Morgan's childhood memories of growing up in a small and isolated valley in the North Carolina mountains are a source of inspiration for his fiction that deals with such powerful and formative experiences as attending Pentecostal services, farming, marriage, and fighting disease. His works include Gap Creek, The Hinterlands, The Truest Pleasure, Brave Enemies and several books of poetry.
Morgan will receive an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Art and Letters at the award ceremony in May 2007, in New York City. In addition, his many other literary awards include four NEA fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. His books have won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, the Association of Appalachian Writers Book of the Year and the James. G. Hanes Poetry Award.
For more information, contact the Avery Arts Council at 828-898-4292 or the Watauga Arts Council at 828-264-1789.
Want To Go?
What: Reading at ASU
Date: Wednesday, April 18
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Location: Belk Library
Cost: Free
Want To Go?
What: Reading at Lees-McRae
Date: Thursday, April 19
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Location: King-Shivell Art Gallery
Cost: Free